A red-letter day
Legislature, Ducey OK budget, teacher pay raises
The Arizona Legislature passed a state budget early Thursday that included nearly $273 million aimed at giving teachers pay raises.
It came after nearly 13 hours of debate in the House and Senate.
Gov. Doug Ducey signed the bill dealing with education, which had the teacher pay-raise plan as part of it, at about 6:10 a.m. Thursday, according to a post on his Twitter feed.
“It’s a good way to start the day,” Ducey said in a video, which he posted on Twitter, of him signing the bill.
Passage of the pay raises was called the triggering event that organizers said would end the
statewide teacher walkout, the largest in recent U.S. history.
The galleries in both chambers remained crowded overnight Wednesday with teachers and education advocates wearing the red shirts indicative of the #RedForEd movement.
The Senate passed all the budget bills just after 5:30 a.m., and the House followed suit more than three hours later.
The House had passed the education portion of the budget first, allowing Ducey to sign it shortly after the Senate passed it. The governor signed the remaining nine budget bills Thursday afternoon.
For the educators, watching the votes wasn’t about a victory. Most of the lawmakers they cheered through the hearings and debates voted against the budget bills.
All but one of the Republicans they jeered voted for it. The education portion of the budget bill had four Democratic votes for it in the Senate; in the House, all Democrats voted against it.
For the educators, it was more about bearing witness and feeling engaged in a process they felt they had spurred on by their threat to walk off the job, followed by the unprecedented action of actually doing so.
Sen. Jamescita Peshlakai, D-Window Rock, in explaining why she voted against the education budget bill, reminded the teachers in the gallery that when the session began, the governor’s budget had teachers getting a 1 percent stipend.
“In reality, our ‘no’ votes and our stances brought (over) most of the people that are going to be voting ‘yes’ for this bill,” she said, “most of them kicking and screaming.”
The #RedForEd movement, started over social media in early March, coalesced into a tangible movement with walk-in demonstrations in schools and, one week ago, a statewide school walkout that affected more than 850,000 students.
As lawmakers opened their sessions Wednesday night, they were looking to accomplish two aims: pass the state’s nearly $10.4 billion budget and make good on the first step to fulfilling Ducey’s aim to give teachers substantial pay raises.
Ducey had called for giving every teacher a 20 percent raise by the year 2020. But the plan, as passed, would fall short of that guarantee.
And pay raises were not the only demand of the grass-roots group that organized the walkout, Arizona Educators United.
Others included a reversal of cuts made in the past decade, a halting of tax cuts and increased salaries for support staff. The group also wanted a 20 percent increase in one year, not three.
Mesnard meets with #RedForEd teachers
Before the House session began, while Democrats were in caucus debating potential ways to raise revenue, House Speaker J.D. Mesnard, RChandler, went to the gallery and addressed the teachers, clad in red Tshirts.
“Looks like we’re going to have a long night ahead of us, so get comfortable,” he said to applause.
It was debatable whether the advocates, seated in theater-style chairs in the gallery or standing on the linoleum lobby and watching the proceedings on television, ever got comfortable. But hundreds stayed up for the long haul.
Ducey vowed in April to give teachers a 9 percent raise next year, followed by 5 percent raises in subsequent years. Coupled with the 1 percent boost given this year, which would be made permanent, it would constitute, he said, a 20 percent raise for every teacher by the year 2020.
The details of the financing deal made that promise difficult to keep, something that lawmakers tried to explain during the hours of hearings.
Teacher pay raise up to districts
Districts, they said, would have the final say on how to spend the money. There was no guarantee — nor was it even a mathematical possibility — that every teacher in the state would receive exactly a 20 percent pay raise.
Mark Zepezauer, an eighth-grade social-studies teacher from Tucson’s Sunnyside Unified School District, said he was disappointed that Ducey was unable to fulfill his promise.
“Right now, we’re getting about four-elevenths of what we were asking for in terms of funding,” Zepezauer said. “It’s all put in a pool, and they throw it at the districts and say, ‘Here, you decide where this goes.’ … They can’t promise us a certain percentage raise.”
Zepezauer had spent Wednesday at the Capitol and, while holding a steaming cup of coffee on an unusually cool